LITTLE ROCK (AP) — Former President Bill Clinton helped U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas kick off his bid for a third term Saturday night, casting the Democratic lawmaker’s re-election fight as a test of whether voters will reward Pryor’s push for bipartisanship over a high-dollar blitz by conservative groups to unseat him.

Clinton returned to his home state to headline a series of fundraisers for Pryor that raised $1 million for his re-election campaign. Pryor doesn’t have an announced Republican opponent, but conservatives have already identified him as a top target in the fight for control of the Senate next year.

“The reason this is a race of national sign is because it’s about whether a senator who cares about his own people more than ideological purity can be financed, elected, lifted by the people he has served in the face of all these crazy currents that are taking America and tearing it to shreds,” Clinton told a crowd of about 600 people gathered at the Statehouse Convention Center in downtown Little Rock.

Clinton was joined by two of the state’s most popular Democratic luminaries — Gov. Mike Beebe and Pryor’s father, former senator and governor David Pryor.

Pryor is launching his campaign with conservative groups already targeting him with a flood of newspaper, radio and television ads. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee, has called defeating Pryor its top priority among the 33 Senate races on the ballot next year. Another conservative group, the Club for Growth, started airing TV spots earlier this month deriding Pryor as President Barack Obama’s closest ally in Arkansas.

Obama lost Arkansas by 24 points in the November election and remains deeply unpopular in the state.

Clinton took aim at the outside groups, telling the audience that Arkansas is small enough to mobilize supporters across the state to fight an “avalanche” of outside money flooding into the state to defeat Pryor.

“We ought to be able to regain our common sense and not be turned into blithering reactionary people who just get our hot buttons punched,” Clinton said. “I’m sick of it and you should be sick of it.”

No Republican has announced a bid to challenge Pryor, but the state GOP chairman has said he’s talked to three top-tier potential candidates. Lt. Gov. Mark Darr has said he’s seriously considering a run for the Republican nomination, and freshman U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton is also frequently mentioned as a potential challenger.

Pryor easily won re-election in 2008 without any GOP opposition, but conservatives believe he’s vulnerable because of Obama’s unpopularity in the state. In 2010, Arkansas Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln lost her bid for a third term. Last year, Republicans swept all four of the state’s U.S. House seats and won control of the Legislature for the first time since Reconstruction.

Pryor, 50, is a former state legislator and attorney general who won the Senate seat in 2002 when he unseated Republican Sen. Tim Hutchinson. Pryor said groups are trying to unseat him because he’s an independent voice who has tried to find bipartisan agreement on issues such as judicial confirmations.

“There’s been all this analysis in Washington about this race, but this race is about one thing plain and simple,” Pryor said. “It’s about Arkansas.”